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Comment by propman | Hacker News Reader

The little passionate website in the 2000s used to be the best source of information if properly vetted. Now it's only big websites regurgitating the same superficial content written by paid writers who have no expertise in the subject matter. They instead just copy other superficial sources.

I think this has dumbed down society because it certainly has dumbed down me. Also, complicated topics are dumbed down to 1 sentence answers and it's very difficult to get detailed information about something. Ironically, I've started to go back to purchasing and reading books if I really want to go in depth on a subject.

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On the other hand, from my experience:

I wanted to see how Raspberry Pi assembly worked - quite a niche subject (who programs? In assembly? On a Raspberry Pi?).

Yet I found quite a few blogs going through the subject - a tutorial of sorts.

I was also looking up how to write an OS (just for fun) - another fairly niche field. Yet I found tons of tutorials in C, C++, and Rust.

I remember trying the same in the 1990s.

Nada.

You couldn't find nothing. I mean maybe you'll find a basic site with the source-dump of an OS (often without building instructions), but you want to dig into the meat (here is how you get from bootloader to x86-64 in 21 days, and why it works)? Foggetaboutit.

I definitely don't want to go back to pre-google web1.0.

In my experience, it depends a lot on how much competition there is from content farms. If your niche isn't targeted by those, it's easy to find the good blogs. Otherwise, it's very difficult.

I suppose that this is a use case where ML could help a lot to recognize "content farmed + SEO optimized" content. Hopefully Google could improve the situation in the future - supposing they are trying.

One of the most entertaining "bugs" that popped up recently while I was looking around for some opinion content that I would _hope_ is recent was that one of the content farm sites plagiarized a rather good blog post, sentence for sentence, for pages and pages. Instead of "I found that ..." they'd thinly-edited it to "Now, let us find..."

The annoying thing was that the content farm appeared _above_ the original content.

Probably because they employed better SEO than the original author :(

Search engines didn't exist until the very end of the 90s. The 00's is the golden age I compare too. And yes there are still some small websites. But they are a lot less common. Especially if you aren't searching for them intentionally. They've made sure you won't accidentally stumble across them. For instance, I just searched "raspberry pi" and most of the results are companies selling them. There's also the official site, official social media accounts, and the wikipedia page.

There was actually a result for a small wiki of pi enthusiasts. But it was buried 10 links down on page 2, and mixed in with all the other noise. There's also a lot of news sites and blogspam (a lot of links have a little indicator that says "x hours ago". As if good articles expire.)

>Search engines didn't exist until the very end of the 90s.

Both Yahoo and AltaVista were started in 95.

That is not related to the search engine itself, this is due to the amount of content available now compared to the 90s.

> I remember trying the same in the 1990s.

A major issue, that affected finding "Raspberry Pi assembly" in the 1990s was that the Raspberry Pi didn't exist yet.

A lesser issue, and perhaps one that may have made it difficult to figure out how to "write an OS (just for fun)" is that few people had done this and published tutorial-style material for absolute beginners on the web- and most of those tutorials that did exist weren't on the world wide web (but on e.g. usenet).

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